If you are having difficulty getting GTK or applications that depend upon GTK to show strings in the language of your current locale this may be helpful.

I installed Gentoo 1.4_rc1 on a brand new machine with the intention of transferring an application I had written in wxPython from a WinXP-Cygwin installation to the new box. After emerging all necessary libraries and transferring the python code, upon starting the application I was surprised to discover all strings were being shown in Kanji.

Output from the command

Code:

locale

showed that the current locale was not set. All values were

Quote:

=POSIX

.

Apparantly the Gentoo installation did not take into account the need for localization. To assign a locale to the installation at a minimum the environmental variable

Code:

LANG

must be correctly set.

Environmental variables for a Gentoo installation are set in the /etc/env.d directory. I created a file 02Language that contained the single line

Code:

LANG=en

to obtain an English localization. To update the environment, once this file was created, the commands

Code:

env-update
source /etc/profile

were issued. locale now showed the environment variables set to "en".

But my application still had Kanji strings. Adding the second territory part to the LANG setting